Lady Gaga-Backed Startup Raises Over $4 Million From Top VC Firms

Joey Primiani co-founded Backplane
The Lady Gaga-backed startup Backplane raised between $4 and $5 million in a series A round from some heavy hitters including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Founders Fund, and others.

Lady Gaga's social network is the first product and it's called Little Monster. It's still private beta, but will likely launch this spring.

The site will launch a number of social networks around artists such as Lady Gaga as well as other groups like developers. Backplane plans to use the money to build out their engineering teams.

Recently, we spoke with Backplane's co-founder Joey Primiani at their headquarters. For background, his startup Cortex was acquired by Backplane for its sharing technology, which allows users to share and send content to various social networks and mobile platforms.

"I'm all about starting this movement. I love technology and love good design. We definitely have an amazing opportunity here to have millions of users -- the most amount of users per employee. We are going to be bigger than Facebook and Google some day," Primiani previously told us.

The connection to Lady Gaga comes from her manager Troy Carter, who is also a co-founder. He said in a statement that he thinks Backplane is set for rapid scale, given the social network effects of Lady Gaga's #Little Monsters. Since Lady Gaga's following on Twitter is the size of Florida, the site has a chance to grow quickly -- that is, if it can convince people to try out, yet another social network.